I’m currently in the process of making my way through the Elixir tasks in
exercism in order to learn the language. Sadly, these code packages are
delivered not as mix packages but as simple .exs files and all examples I’ve
found where around using dialyzer when combined with mix for doing static
analysis.

(Please note that this is basically just a documentation of some of the
baby-steps I’m taking in Erlang/Elixir land right now. All of this is probably
obvious for people who have lived there for years.)

Luckily, it seems to be quite simple to run the tool against single compiled
files (and why wouldn’t it? I’m new to Erlang and Elixir 😉):

If you’ve never executed dialyzer before (as I have) you will get a message
that it first requires something called a “PLT” (Persistent Lookup Table)
which contains the results of an analysis. In this case you need it in order to
give dialyzer a starting set of known types.

For my system I simply took the local Elixir installation as well as the Erlang
Runtime as starting point (as per Dave Thomas’ awesome
Programming Elixir book):